


Bad Moon Rising

by frankcastles (annamak)



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-10 10:26:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11689728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annamak/pseuds/frankcastles
Summary: The Walking Dead AU in which Shane kills Rick in the field and becomes the de facto group leader.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own The Walking Dead or its characters. Some dialogue has been changed because I'm not a master memory person who remembers the exacts, and since I'm messing up the timeline anyway.....

The kid was already dead.

Shane snapped his neck in the woods and left him for walker fodder. They never should have kept him so long. Rick was a damn fool for thinking that was a good idea.

In this world, you killed walkers, and you killed those you couldn’t trust.

Shane couldn’t trust Rick not to keep making stupid decisions. So after killing the kid, he led a small party into the woods to “find” him (having told everyone he escaped), and he took Rick off alone.

He could already tell that Rick knew what was happening, but it only spurred him on. This was best for the group. For Carl. For Lori. After Rick ignored the walkers in the barn because it was Hershel’s land – and God forbid Rick go against a man’s opinion on his own land, even if it meant safety for the group – Shane knew something needed to change. Fuck the old man’s thoughts. This world was about survival.

“We’re not here for the kid, are we?” Rick asked as they approached a small clearing. Shane scoffed at the stupid question.

“I know it didn’t take you this long to figure out.” He had his gun in hand – safety off, locked, loaded.

“No. Why all the effort though, Shane? What’s this gonna prove?”

“You’re weak, Rick. Letting Hershel keep the walkers and not telling us. We would have packed up a long time ago if we knew sooner.” They had stayed for Carl, but what good was bed rest if he was a sitting duck twenty yards from hungry walkers trying to escape their barn prison?

“You overreacted—”

“No. _You_ didn’t react enough,” he interrupted. “That man had a dozen or so walkers just sitting in that barn, and we were right there. Lori was, Carl was. Dammit, Rick! We’d been searching for Sophia this whole damn time, wasting time and energy and resources, and she was in that damn barn! I knew she was dead, Rick, and I told you we needed to move on. And if I hadn’t finally opened that barn and shot those walkers, we’d all have joined her soon enough.” He let out a breath and raised his gun.

“Shane…” Rick spoke calmly, trying to talk Shane down. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You’re weak, Rick,” he repeated. “You’re just not good for the group.” He paused, hesitating because no matter what he felt, Rick was still his brother on the force back at home, and it was hard to willingly pull the trigger. “I’ll tell them we were overrun and you died helping me,” he whispered. A final flash of regret cross his eyes before he pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through Rick’s head.

The silence that followed deafened him, and he dropped to his knees, eyes watering as he stared at his fallen friend.

It was for the best, he kept telling himself. Rick would only endanger them further.

A guttural noise caught his attention, and he looked up to see a small group of walkers cresting the hill to the clearing. He took a few shots, dropping some of them, only to lower his gun and stare in awe as another two dozen soon followed.

“Shit…” he muttered, before finally kicking his own ass into gear and running. A few of the walkers moved to Rick’s body – still warm – for a snack, but more followed him. Knowing he wouldn’t lose them, he started yelling as he sprinted back, telling everyone to pack up, get in the cars, get moving.

They couldn’t stay at Hershel’s farm. Not anymore.


	2. Escape

“Shane! What’s going on?”

Shane hadn’t realized that in his frantic yelling, he had lost most of his clarity. He yelled and flailed his arms and gestured wildly, but it wasn’t until Andrea spotted the first few walkers that people started to understand him.

Chaos consumed the farm as everyone rushed to pack up the cars, grabbing only the essentials and leaving the tents where they stood. Shane grabbed one of his rifles and started shooting, picking them off one by one to gran his group a few more minutes. But they didn’t have enough ammunition to fend off every walker in the pack that lumbered toward them.

“Lori! Get you and Carl in the car! Now!” If he left camp with just the two of them, he would be okay, though he knew they needed some of the others to keep surviving. (Then again, a few of them he could do without…)

“Shane, where’s Rick?”

“Lori, I said get in the car!”

“Shane!”

“Not now, Lori. Get in the car!” He didn’t have time to explain, and he needed to give himself a little more time to formulate his story too. At least he did feel guilty about killing his friend; he also felt justified. He just had to feed into the guilt more in order to be believable, and he knew Lori would likely blame him either way. Since Rick’s return, nothing Shane did was acceptable in her eyes, but he wanted that semblance of normal back that they had.

He wanted that family back.

He looked toward the walkers again, just in time to come face to face with one. He kicked it back, wincing because he used his bad leg, then shot it in the head.

Shane stayed shooting until everyone had packed up, thought it seemed there were a few stragglers coming from the house. But they all couldn’t wait. Lori yelled at him as soon as he got in the driver’s seat.

“Andrea and Carol are still out there! We can’t leave them!” Shane didn’t want to. Andrew was a great shot, and he knew how much the women meant to each other in their little community.

“We can’t, Lori,” he said. Self-preservation came first. “You’ll just have to hope they get out.”

“Really, Shane? They’re outnumbered. You _have_ to help them!”

“Lori, we have to—”

“Rick would!”

“And Rick’s not fucking here! We can’t save everyone. We just have to save who we can without unnecessary risk.” Heading back into a massive horde of zombies was very much an unnecessary risk. The women had guns; there were cars near them.

“Shane Walsh, so help me, you will drive and get them.” Shane stared at her, and Lori glared back. A moment passed, and with a grumble he put the car into drive and pulled up by Beth. Carl opened the door for her. “Beth, where’s Andrea?”

“I think – overtaken – go!” Beth said through frantic breaths and tears. She looked back for Carol, happy to see her hop on the back of Daryl’s bike. Shane gunned it, peeling away from Hershel’s farm. The others fell in caravan behind him.

Save for Beth’s soft sobs, silence filled the car for a few miles. Carl broke it first.

“Where’s my dad?” Lori covered her mouth with a hand and tried not to cry, and Shane just stared at the road. He had been so overcome with adrenaline during the attack (and after, while driving) that he hadn’t fully created his story, and he doubted improvising something like this would work well.

“Shane?” Lori, this time.

“He didn’t make it,” he finally answered. “The walkers, they just… I tried killing as many as I could, but… there were too many. Rick ran out of amma.” He stopped, eyes still on the road.

“Shane,” Lori said, her tone now verging on accusatory. Carl started crying in the back seat.

“You saw how many there were, Lori. I did everything I could. He hasn’t been out here as long, made a mistake.”

“You could have done more!”

“You keep thinking that! No matter what I do, that’s what you think!” He didn’t want to argue in front of Beth and Carl. He lowered his voice again. “There was nothing I could do…” he added, hoping she would drop it.

“This conversation isn’t over,” Lori said, though she ended with that and stared out the window, leaving the car in silence again, save for the sniffling of Beth and Carl in the back.

* * *

 

As the sun started to set, Shane looked for a place to stop, and he finally spotted a dirt space right off the side of the road where they could park the vehicles. He pulled into it; the rest of the caravan followed. They had woods immediately to one side and road (then woods) to the other.

Shane stepped out of the car. When Daryl’s motorcycle engine cut, he addressed him. “He me scope a perimeter. See if there’s anything we could use and drop any walkers roaming nearby.” Daryl nodded, though he looked skeptically at the fact it was Shane giving the order and not Rick. Recently, it had always been Rick.

The two walked ten paces apart from each other, not exchanging words. Shane figured Daryl knew people died, and it wasn’t as if he and Rick were best friends from the short time they’d known each other.

“Seems clear,” Daryl muttered. “You head back without me. I’m gonna use the last bit of light to see if I can hunt anything.” Shane nodded. He trusted Daryl could at least return with a few squirrels for the group to cook up.

Carol and Lori had started a fire by the time he returned. The rest had started setting up some makeshift tents from items left in the cars.

“Shane!” Lori was up, coming at him, then dragging him back into the woods and away from the group. For privacy. “You better start talking, Shane Walsh, or so help me, I’ll kill you myself.”

“I already told you what happened.”

“And you expect me to believe you? After Otis?”

Shane froze. He didn’t think anyone – especially not Lori – had kept thinking about what happened that night at the high school enough to actually suspect him of what he’d done to return safely.


End file.
